Transportation
Making a Real Underground Railroad
The novelist Colson Whitehead talks about the truth behind his alternative history of the pre-Civil War South—and why he can’t stop writing about trains.
At 16 or maybe 17—she doesn’t remember her age—Cora runs away from the hellish cotton plantation in Georgia where she’s lived her entire life. After a close call, she and a fellow fugitive make it to the Underground Railroad: a clandestine network of subterranean railway lines that funnels slaves to freedom. Cora’s harrowing journey northward, pursued by notorious slave catcher Ridgeway, provides the focus of Colson Whitehead’s new novel Underground Railroad (Doubleday).
The real-life “railroad,” of course, had no tracks or locomotives: It was a very loosely organized network of resources—secret routes and safe houses—set up by former slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists to help slaves in Antebellum South flee.